Design of Very High-Speed Pipeline FIR Filter Through Precise Critical Path Analysis

In this paper, we propose a new hardware architecture of a very high-speed finite impulse response (FIR) filter using fine-grained seamless pipelining. The proposed full-parallel pipeline FIR filter can produce an output sample in a few gate delays by placing the pipeline registers not only in between components, but also across the components. A precise critical path analysis at the gate level allows to create an appropriate pipelining strategy depending on the throughput requirement. This paper also presents two alternative architectures, each offering different trade-offs in terms of area and throughput rate. The proposed FIR filters are synthesized to measure the maximum throughput and the balance between complexity and speed. The synthesis results show that the proposed fully pipelined FIR filter supports up to throughput of 1.8 Giga samples per second and offers 73.5% less area-delay product (ADP) than the existing systolic designs. Also, the proposed single multiplier-accumulator (MAC) based FIR filter has 3 times higher throughput and 26.0% less area with 75.8% less ADP compared to the existing design.